get donkey!

As if you didn’t already know

Chicago Tribune public editor, Don Wycliff pens a piece about how the press protects President Bush.

Here is a sample:

Why is the Democrat-loving, Republican-hating, pond scum-swilling, lower-than-the-rug-on-the-floor, biased, liberal [curl upper lip when pronouncing] press protecting George W. Bush?

You don’t believe it’s happening? Well, then, tell me about the furor over W’s speech last week to a joint meeting in Washington of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America.

You didn’t hear about it?

That’s the proof.

If the press were not protecting Bush, you’d have read in your Chicago Tribune–or Washington Post or New York Times or Wall Street Journal or USA Today–that he delivered one of the most confusing, inarticulate public addresses since … well, some people would say since his press conference a week earlier.

As it was, those hopelessly biased reporters who cover Bush overlooked the mangled syntax, penetrated the rhetorical fog and extracted some usable lines from the dross and manufactured stories that had the president sounding, if not quite statesmanlike, then at least intelligible.

The New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller led with Bush’s response to a poll that showed the majority of Americans expect another terrorist attack in the U.S. before the November election. “Well, I understand why they think they’re going to get hit again,” Bush was quoted as saying. “This is a hard country to defend.”

The Washington Post focused on his remarks about Iran’s effort to acquire nukes. “The Iranians need to feel the pressure from the world that any nuclear weapons program will be uniformly condemned–it’s essential that they hear that message,” the president was quoted.

Neither The Wall Street Journal nor the Tribune carried a story about the speech per se, although the Tribune carried an Associated Press story that wove one quote from the speech into a story on the unexpectedly high costs of the Iraqi excursion. “The Iraqi people are looking at Americans and saying, `Are we going to cut and run again?’” the quote ran. “And we’re not going to cut and run if I’m in the Oval Office.”

I hope we start to see more columns like this.

April 30th, 2004 Posted by Rob | General | 2 comments